How to Escape the Funhouse Mirror of Culture Through Our Art
Artist Amy Sherald and Ta-Nehisi Coates discuss how she uses her portraits to explore her own multifaceted American identity (a search for self that's relevant to all creative mediums)
“When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?” —Oscar Wilde, from DE PROFUNDIS: THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL AND OTHER WRITINGS (1905)
Identity is a tricky concept and one that most of us spend our whole lives trying to work out for ourselves. Much of the reason for this is we so often exist as a reflection of how others see us — or, rather, trapped in that reflection — a process that begins with our family and intensifies throughout our early education. It’s why so many of us don’t want to let go of our “glory days”, the ones we let pass us by in a wink of the eye (to paraphrase the Boss), because we were at our best in so many people’s eyes way back then.
I spend a lot of time at 5AM StoryTalk discussing one of art’s most critical roles as a mirror to be held up to society and to each of us, as individuals, to show us who we really are, to reveal uncomfortable truths, to provoke and, on occasion, provoke change. But what I’m describing regarding the formation of our identities also suggests we, as individuals, share this same relationship with the world around us (it’s also true of our national identities, but that’s an essay for another day).
This relationship is certainly less uncomfortable when we are already centered in a culture or are even identified as, say, its masters. For example, being white in America and, more specifically, being a white cishet male in America. That has meant something for a very long time in the country, it comes with baggage of all varieties that we don’t need to debate here. The point is, it tells you who you are in a country that has, for most of its run, always recognized such persons as exceptional at birth.
But what is it like to be, say, Latino in the context of America’s funhouse of carnival mirrors that reflect warped versions of you back at you? Or Black in the U.K. or Germany? Or Middle Eastern in France? Or First Nations in Australia where I live? Hell, what is it like to be a woman or LGBQT+ person in these places and others? Or Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist? Or anyone, really? These reflections of you — distorted, unreal, dangerous — inevitably begin to define you whether you like it or not. Even trap you, as I suggested above.
Recently, I went down the Amy Sherald rabbit hole. She’s an American artist, born in Georgia in 1973. You might know her as the person who painted Michelle Obama’s stunning portrait. This is because Sherald is a portraitist of (typically) everyday Black people. She focuses on a kind of realism that strips away their surroundings and imagines the mundanity of their lives. She also chooses to paint their blackness in shades of gray, a characteristic detail of her work.
I think it’s fair to say she’s become one of my favorite 21st-century artists.
While in this Sherald rabbit hole, I came across an interview she did with the brilliant Ta-Nehisi Coates. One exchange in particular grabbed me and I have thought about it a lot ever since. It concerns Sherald discovering how limiting and creatively dangerous seeing herself through others’ eyes had become and how she turned to her portraits to explore her own multifaceted identity. An identity, it sounds like, that had become stifled by how the world only saw her as Black when she had come to imagine herself as so much more than just that.
Here’s the exchange I’m describing. I share it and my thoughts here not as answers or a roadmap of any kind for you on your own journey — either personal or creative — but simply to provide you an example of someone else’s in case it helps you reflect on your own as it did with me. Perhaps it will inspire you in unexpected ways, push you in new directions, or reveal something about yourself that you hadn’t expected.
TA-NEHISI COATES: I've heard you say that your work is not necessarily about resistance. That it is of Black people being allowed to just be. Of being. And what I hear is maybe a pushback against the didactic, the need to overtly sloganeer in your work. Where are you coming from when you think about that? Is that a reaction to the history of Black art?
AMY SHERALD: I'm coming from a place of expansion, of needing to expand myself. I'm coming from understanding my place and absence in art history as a woman and a Black woman. When I was visiting chair at the Maryland Institute College of Art, I was working with a lot of young Black artists. They're learning history, and then they make work in reaction to that history. I think that is necessary, but a lot of it has already been done before, so I was urging them to dive deeper into who they are. To create work from a historically significant space, but forward-thinking.
I really think there are limitations when you get stuck inside of any kind of thing - it can be any kind of identity, however you identify. And I think, for me, with the way that Black identity has been consumed publicly, the way that we can attach our experience to that, to the struggle for civil rights or the micro-aggressions that we experience - that can become your whole world. That can become all you wake up and think about, how you live your life and experience yourself.
I thought I was going to die at thirty-nine, so at that time, I was really searching for a lot of truth. I really wanted to know who I was. I am a Black woman, I am a global southerner, I am a mixture of German-Jewish and African - there's a lot of things that I am, but my whole life I had only focused on my blackness. I had never even really focused on my gender, on being a woman, because my skin color always preceded all. It's what I felt people saw first.
I think it's important to have a place to go where you can reflect, and these paintings became that for me. I needed a place to go where I could just be. I needed to shift my lens - like these are my Black glasses, and these are my Amy glasses, where Amy gets to figure out who she would be without the constructs of race, gender, religion, and preconceived notions. It is about letting go of looking at people looking at me. You know what I mean? There's this self-awareness you have as you move through the world, when you enter into spaces like white spaces, where you are watching yourself being watched. You're not even experiencing your own self in that moment. You're experiencing a reel in your head of what somebody else is thinking about your presence in that space.
You can read more about Amy Sherald here.
My debut novel PSALMS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD is out now from Headline Books, Hachette Australia, and more. You can order it here wherever you are in the world:
